I'm moving to Portland! More later...

Let us be clear on what a sacrifice is: when you make a sacrifice, you choose unselfishly to give up something for yourself for the benefit of others. You choose this although you know what you have to lose, and you know you will never get it back in any way or shape or form. When you bring up a sacrifice – no matter how big or small – in the context of discussing who does what for whom, favors, decency, expectations, etc, you are in a single stroke turning a noble deed into an underhanded manipulation. If you want to sacrifice something for me, I can’t stop you, but do so knowing I may never know about or understand your sacrifice. Don’t make sacrifices you can’t carry, they tend to last longer than your initial decision to make them. I know I’m not perfect in this regard either, but I’m trying. Really, I am.

Yeah so my cell phone died, I have a new cell now but no numbers to put in it. My number hasn't changed, but I need yours. Sooooo I'll set comment screening to on etc.. heck might as well post your address if you're not feeling too lazy.. might as well get everything in here at once.

Devil's Dictionary addendum #364:
Ray Bradbury (person) : The resulting author of a literary genetics crossover between pulp science-fiction and South American magical realism. Probably just a little insane, to boot.

Ok they have me a little worried. I don't know about you, but tonight I'm gonna go through and archive everything I want to keep locally on my various accounts. Maybe it's just time to move on to a new venue? I dunno...

I caught myself meditating today on artificial intelligence and pain, and whether pain was "real" or not. I was thinking about those new systems that the military is using for recruiting and some airlines is using to streamline web customer support.

Part of constructing an AI is designing it how to learn and adapt, and training it. To start with, a good AI will have a somewhat arbitrary set of weights assigned to help it interpret data and stimulae (this is good, this is bad), as well as feedback to help decide if it made a good or bad choice.

How does this translate? At what point do we say an AI is sentient, and at what point do we call that feedback "pain"?

I could see how it would happen - one day, an AI analyst is working with an AI, when suddenly the machine informs the analyst, "It hurts." The analyst discovers that the AI has come to associate a wrong choice with pain. Is it feeling pain like we do?

The first thing I think is, "no, of course not, we feel biological pain". But think about it, what IS pain exactly? It's just feedback, electrical impulses managed by a chemical network that turns on and off switches in the brain. It's no more or less real than the electrical impulses that flow through a circuit board. We hurt physically because our body tells us we need to, and chemical unbalances aside, we hurt emotionally when we process/interpret negative data.

Can you imagine how painful it must be, therefore, to be an AI? In my mental excursion, I imagine the AI informing the programmer analyst how to adjust its own program so that it can learn in a gentler, less painful way...